The ability to detect and monitor occupants in a space, such as a room or building, enables planning and controlling home or building systems for better space utilization, to minimize energy use, for security systems and more.
Computer vision is sometimes used to analyze an imaged space and to detect occupants in the space.
There exist systems that use one or more cameras to monitor a space or area. Some of these systems use cameras located in a ceiling of a monitored area providing overhead tracking of occupants. However, in the case of overhead tracking, the shapes of people's bodies are highly deformable and show very high perspective distortion. Thus, top view images are not easily understood by current image analysis techniques and systems using top view images do not easily detect people.